Software

This site is based on software which processes the networks to generate formats, to generate webpages, and to perform calculations on the networks. It is suited only for this project and does not carry much that could be transferred to analyze other works of art. Following the open approach of this project, I license the software for usage by others and publish the code. I strongly doubt, however, that there are real applications of it for any other purpose. Perhaps, it might serve some educational purposes.

We mainly use the language Perl for programming. Perl is known to be rather unreadable and hard to understand. It is kind of an intellectual challenge to program with it, but this raises the level of satisfaction, whenever something works as it should be. Please excuse my bad programming skills, my lack of knowledge on how to write good Perl programs, and the choice of Perl in the first place. To push even further, some software is written in XSLT which is even more unreadable but come with declarative elegance. For visualizations, I chose d3.js as a JavaScript framework, which also is not easy to grasp. But somehow all this fits good together.

So, without being too sorry about this, here are the scripts that I wrote and use.

Generation of Web pages for the site and necessary data structures. We compute sets of webpages by processing the networks in advance. Sometimes we cheat concerning the layout and pages seem to come from WordPress but they just imitate the layout.

works.pl generates the “homepages” for the digitized drawings performing various calculations on the networks.

[This site is currently experimental for demonstration purposes. The data, especially the graphs are alpha versions and should not be used further. The services are for demonstration only and might not work as they should in a future version.
To grasp quickly the benefits of the digital graphs look at the services and the networks pages.
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Since we had to merge all networks into one for measuring anyway, it was simple to convert it into JSON format and to visualize it. By this, we have synthesized the largest Lombardi network ever. An interesting observation is, that …Continue reading →

For every drawing we now include statistics on the degrees in the network. In the Network analysis page, we also show the distributions for the union of all drawings that we digitized and for a union in which aliases names …Continue reading →

For each drawing, we can try to automatically derive the start and end date of the narration by two ways. We can look at the title of the work, these often include year ranges. We can also look into the …Continue reading →